This time I woke up not because of pain, but simply because I didn't want to sleep anymore. It's a strange situation for me, because as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to sleep in the morning, even though I had to get up early to get to work on time. I can't even imagine the titanic efforts my wife made every morning to get me out of bed... So, my wife, as soon as I mentioned my Valiusha, my heart felt heavy, I don't know where I am, I don't know how I got here, I don't know anything, and most importantly, I don't know when I will be able to see my beloved again, and in general, whether I will ever be able to hug my Valiusha.

Until recently, it seemed to me that our love was no longer as strong as at the beginning of our life together, but now I realized that I feel bad without her, very bad. Eh, it's not the time to plunge into self-exploration now, it's not the time, I need to figure out at least a little bit about what surrounds me, because all I've managed to find out so far is that I'm a criminal, that I'm on a space station and that there is a planet below us after a nuclear war. And so far, this information has not pleased me, although there was something strange.

I, a completely civilian person, the most extreme thing I took part in was evacuating the city at the beginning of the war during an air raid. And here I was being chased by the police, shooting with them, outer space, seriously wounded, prosthetics, being in a radioactively contaminated area, and I still didn't curl up in the fetal position and start crying and complaining, there was something wrong with my head, one hundred percent. I turned to my side and saw Leah, she was sleeping nervously, twitching in her sleep, yesterday when she came back to the room she woke me up, she was too drunk, she could barely stand up, and in the room she fell three times before she could lie down on the bed next to me. Who was she? At first, I thought she was just a criminal like my body that I woke up in for some reason, but the more I talked to her, the more it became clear that it was not that simple.

I'm not quite up to speed on the world around me yet, but I already realize that her grandfather is a very complicated person, and how old is he? If the reactor accident occurred more than a hundred years ago, then the station already existed then, and judging by what her grandfather said, he lived during the war, that is, before the construction of this station.

And the equipment that is available in the laboratory, the disintegrator, is, as gamers like to say, imba. And the technology of simulation for consciousness? By the way, I still don't know what those simulations were about and what they managed to learn. Although the fact that they fitted me with a shoulder prosthesis and did not throw me outside without protection suggests that what they heard did not disappoint them too much.

"You're awake now, so you don't have to pretend," I said, noticing how Leah's breathing changed.

"My head," Leah groaned as she turned onto her back, "It's splitting into thousands of pieces.

"You shouldn't have drunk so much last night," I said as I got out of bed.

"We should have remembered everyone," Leah replied, immediately becoming more serious, "Someone is deliberately killing off the newcomers to the thieves' guild. Akas said that half of this year's newcomers have been killed in the last six months. "

"Maybe someone wants to take the guild's place?" I asked Leah, starting to do some light warm-ups, I wanted to feel my new body completely. The fact that it was younger than my real body was a fact, this body was not even twenty years old, maybe seventeen, maybe nineteen. Unlike me, covered with a thin layer of fat from a sedentary job, the new body was toned and even pumped up.

"Akas thinks so too, but the guild leaders turn a blind eye to all his suggestions," Leah rolled her eyes to the ceiling, "These old guys are now engaged in a..." the girl started to say, but stopped in time.

"Leah, don't think I'm stupid, what I heard yesterday was enough to understand what was being planned," I answered the girl, sitting down on the only chair in the room. "But I won't say it out loud, as you asked," I smiled, "Do you have anything to eat?" I changed the subject.

"You're a typical man, you'd like to eat everything," the girl laughed and then became more serious, "And you've become smarter, you didn't understand everything you were told directly before."

"Maybe I was pretending? Maybe it was convenient for me to be stupid for others?" I asked Leah, putting aside another pebble of information about who this Zach was. By the way, our names are even similar, Zachary and Zach. I don't believe in such coincidences, oh, I don't.

"Go... downstairs," Leah added after a short pause. "Akas was supposed to make breakfast. But don't expect the usual dishes." Leah warned me and kicked me out of the room.

Yesterday, I was too tired to pay attention to the space around me, but here was something to see. The corridor of the second floor was hung with dozens of paintings, and when I approached one of them, I noticed uneven strokes of paint, all the paintings were definitely painted by hand. And this is already impressive, I especially liked the picture of a high-tech house and children in a kindergarten in front of it. I had a feeling that right now I could hear the kids laughing and the aroma of fruit trees. The picture was definitely painted by a professional, it was very realistic, and given the impossibility of depicting the last hundred or more years on canvas, this picture gave off special feelings.

"And you have taste. "Happiness" by Gitrud Pervansky, a banned painting, was painted in the first years after the war during the construction of this station. " I heard Akas's voice from behind me, the thief, I didn't even hear him approach me.

"What's so forbidding about it?" I asked Akas, turning to him. "Just a garden with fruit trees in front of the house with children playing. "

"So Leah was right, you don't remember anything, let's follow me, during breakfast I'll tell you a little about the world around you," Akas replied and pulled me downstairs, where a table set for three was waiting for us.

To summarize his story. It is now forbidden to say that life once existed on the planet. For the majority of the Xarlex population born in the last fifty years, there was no other world but the Xarlex station. Only a small group of people who were engaged in maintaining the station's working condition knew about the world around them.

I learned some very important information from Akas, and it changed a lot of things. If I used to think that this was just a post-apocalyptic world, now I realized that it was not. There were other worlds, or rather not worlds, but inhabited star systems. And Xarlex even maintained ties with them. In exchange for the resources mined on the planet below, a transport ship arrives every six months with food supplies to keep the station alive.

The information I learned made me both happy and sad at the same time. I was pleased because the level of technology could be much higher, and spoiled because I realized that all the people on this station were now slaves. Slaves of the elite who took advantage of the station's ignorance, and deliberately deepened this ignorance.

"Akas, as always, you are trying to close the gaps in the education of young people," Leah sat down next to us and immediately began to eat with appetite. "You know that for this conversation, plus five years in the mines below.

"What do I care about those five years, kid? If I get caught, I'll get at least a couple of thousand years, or even execution," Akas laughed. "You won't give me away, will you?" Akas began to mock.

"Oh, teacher, I won't give you away if you tell me what's going on with Brailo. Yesterday you refused to talk to me about it when you were drunk."

"In my opinion, it is not a good idea to go to a meeting with him. According to my information, he bought a military flyer from the aliens, how he pulled it off I have no idea, but there are facts that he has a flyer, but he has a flyer, but no energy to him. He captured Dilk Ironhand, thinking that he could do something, but this is a different level, if flayer was one or two generations older, Dilk would have come up with something. But he was the seventh generation. So he needs the energy cell, he really needs it." Akas answered.

"Does he have the money?" Leah asked the teacher.

"He has money, both credits and ksars." At the last word, both Leah and Akas grimaced, it seems to me that ksars are something local and not reliable. " But will he want to give them back?"

"What about the guild's guarantees?" Leah asked Akas.

"Of course, you pay your dues all the time, but who are you and who is he? I'm not sure that the guild would want to spoil relations with him. Let me remind you, he has a military flyer, fully equipped, but no energy cell. " Akas replied.

"So what? Don't go?" Leah asked the teacher seriously.

"You can't, he already knows you have an energy cell." Akas replied. "The cameras recorded strange people around this hotel last night. He won't let you go. "

" So what should I do?" Leah asked in confusion.

"There's not much I can advise you on that; it's dangerous to go, but it's even more dangerous not to go," Akas replied. "The only thing I can do is warn you, and then, you are a big girl, you have to decide for yourself. If you want not to go, I will give you a map of unknown tunnels. If you want to go, you can get weapons from the warehouse. "

"Who made me get involved with Brailo?" Leah shook her head. " I think we should get going, can you give us access to the workshop?"

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"I will," Akas replied, standing up from his chair. "And now I have to go to class, today the kids have their first bell exam." After saying that, Akas left the room, but Leah remained silent for a while.

"Let's go, we need to get ready."

We spent the next two hours in the workshop. I saw the energy cell for the first time with my own eyes, it was a cylinder forty centimeters long and about twenty in diameter. From Leah's explanation, I learned that the energy cell is a super battery, it has enough energy to power a flyer for a year.

And as it turned out, they were invented on Xarlex one hundred and fifty years ago, and it was this invention that caused the war between the two leading countries of Xarlex. And then, after the war, aliens got in touch with the survivors, revealing to everyone the existence of other civilizations. It was for the technology of creating energy cells and all the available reserves of energy cells that the aliens helped to build this space station.

It was only about ten years ago that alien-made energy cells began to appear among the technological products of aliens that were being sold on the station's black market. According to Leah's grandfather, these fakes were not even a hundredth as good as those invented before the war on Xarlex.

Now Leah was busy bringing the energy cell to its maximum operating mode and setting a fuse that would not allow it to explode the next moment. Such knowledge in the technology of the energy cell was surprising, very surprising, it was clearly not the kind of knowledge that you would suspect in the head of a thief, and at the same time led to some dangerous thoughts.

"Zach, I know you're a bit of a douchebag right now, but we can't do this without you. Look, all you have to do is transmit a signal on this channel and the fuse will disappear, there will be no more than one minute before the explosion and it will be impossible to stop it. Here's your remote, don't blow us up by accident," Leah smiled.

"And you?"

"I also have a channel of communication with the energy cell," Leah tapped her implant, which ran from her eye to her ear along her temple. "If they take the energy cell from us by force, we don't argue, we give it back and leave, then you or I transmit a signal and a minute later a big badaboom," she smiled bloodthirstily.

"How big? We did not want to cause the destruction of the station and the deaths of thousands of people."

"Oh, don't think about it, it's an alien energy cell, and it's not a new one, judging by the logs, it's been in some civilian droid for ten years. So there's no more than forty percent of the charge left. I think it will take out everything within a couple of dozen meters, no more," Leah answered, not very confidently, "The main thing is to make a record if he refuses to pay. It won't make us any money, but if we post it on the guild network, they'll be much more careful about dealing with him."

I didn't ask if Brailo people would die in the process, it was clear enough. And now I didn't understand my feelings, I realized that I might have to kill living people, but somehow it didn't really cause me to protest. Either I've lost my mind, or it's a legacy from the previous owner of the body.

After the workshop, we went to the warehouse, where Leia bought me a shoulder blaster for five thousand alien credits, which is usually attached to the armor of a suit, but in my case she managed to make it on a prosthetic. In addition, she bought a set of some micro droids for herself, ten of them fit into a matchbox-sized box.

We still had two hours to go before meeting with Brailo and it would take us no more than thirty minutes to get there, so we decided to relax a bit and chat with Leah's colleagues, they started to gather for lunch at the Akasa Hotel and we managed to listen to the local gossip. And they were not happy, one way or another, everyone was preparing for the upcoming clash with officials troops when breaking into more habitable sectors of the station.

Leah told me that here, in Sector Ten Forty-three, more than two hundred thousand people used to live when she was a child, and now the total population is less than fifty thousand, a fourfold decrease in ten years, which is a lot. Yes, some people were able to move to more livable sectors, some died in criminal conflicts between gangs, but the majority, ninety percent, died of radiation sickness.

It was clear why the still living residents of this sector wanted to move. But residents of other sectors will definitely not like it, so there will be a massacre in the near future. This is probably the first time that different gangs are uniting and military units are being formed on the basis of gangs. Against this background, I was now beginning to understand why Brailo had bought the flyer and that even if he didn't pay us anything, the guild would not protect us.

I wanted to leave this sector of the station as soon as possible, as I felt that anything could be a pretext for a massacre. After talking to Leah's colleagues, and most likely the colleagues of the previous body owner, we left the Akasa Hotel wearing masks.

Almost immediately I noticed a tail behind us. Three men armed with heavy handguns weren't even hiding and were walking about thirty meters behind us. Leah only hissed at this and recommended that we be prepared for anything.

On the way, I could admire the garbage bunker of the compartment of sector ten forty-three, which was located outside the entire sector of the plant and therefore had the lowest level of radiation, since the reactor itself was in the middle of the sector. Previously, this bunker was used to process organic waste with the help of special bacteria, but now people lived here who bred bacteria mutated by radiation and used them as food. These bacteria grew on any surface where there was even a drop of organic matter. It was enough to spit, and in a few days a bacterial growth would grow in that place. From Leah's story, I learned about cases where bacteria devoured living people who had been outside for a long time and had not been cleaned under ultraviolet radiation. So it was a fun place, very fun.

"Zack, we're here," Leah answered and stood near the remains of the half-disassembled space shuttle.

"Here they are, " we saw a dozen speeders approaching in our direction. " Leah, I have a bad feeling about this," I answered, noticing how Brailo's men started to get off the speeders, but Brailo himself was not there. From Leah's description, I knew that he was a man of about fifty with a big belly, but there were only fit men here.

"Did you put up the energy cell for sale?" one of the men asked me, unlike the others, he was not carrying a heavy weapon. Only a holster with a pistol.

"I am," I answered, stepping forward a little. "You owe two hundred thousand, we owe an energy cell."

"Well, two hundred is two hundred," the man surprisingly agreed easily and threw me the card, "and now the energy cell." I meanwhile handed the card to Leah, who quickly checked it on the reader and returned it to me, it had only two hundred xaras, or about two credits.

"There are almost two hundred thousand credits missing here. " I answered, assessing the situation around us, and it was not very good. We were already completely surrounded, no guns were pointed at us, but it was clear that we should give them an order and that was it.

"I don't know anything, I gave you a card with payment, you owe me an energy cell. "The man replied, smiling, "Or do you mean to say that I'm cheating?" At that moment, the capacitors of the weapon began to hum from the accumulated charge.

"Come on, of course you're not lying. But there is one thing," I said, assessing the situation, they were not going to let us go. Only the fact that they did not see the energy cell in our hands stopped them from attacking us directly. "We don't have it with us," in fact, it was in Leah's backpack.

The next moment, one of the militants lost his nerve and fired at the floor next to us. He was in vain, because on instinct I immediately started shooting back, jumping towards the old boat, and while jumping, the second gun turned around my right hand, and when I landed near the boat I was already shooting from the blaster on my shoulder and arm at the same time.

They definitely didn't expect it, in just three seconds there were four headless corpses, and then it all started, I didn't even think about what I was doing, I just shot, one shot, one corpse, though it didn't last long, we had to dive into the middle of the boat to protect ourselves from the oncoming shots, and the next moment we heard the man screaming, he was ordering us to stop shooting so as not to damage the energy cell.

"Zach, you're back," Leah said cheerfully as she changed the batteries in her blaster and my two. "Let's have some fun," she shouted and fired at the main man. Unfortunately, there was some kind of protective field around him that did not miss the shot.

"I propose negotiations," he shouted. "We will not leave here without the energy cell. And you won't have the surprise effect anymore, I don't think you can repeat your result.

"From the very beginning, I offered to make a deal: you give us money, we'll give you an energy cell," I shouted back.

"I admit we started the conversation wrong. But you have to understand us, too, when a low-level thief who was recently shot by the cops appears out of nowhere. "

"This is no reason to cheat," I replied, "We can make a deal, two hundred thousand and a speeder as moral compensation.

"You're not as simple as your dossier says," the man laughed. "Fifty thousand and a speeder.

"That speeder doesn't even cost twenty," I didn't really know how much it cost, but given how easily Leah had sent it to blow up yesterday, I assumed it wasn't too expensive.

" No one is saying that he's worth more, I'll say even more, each of them is worth no more than ten. But as you put it, moral compensation, you killed four. " The man answered as he approached us.

"Agree, we have to get out of here, if he gets tired of negotiating, they will bury us here," Leah whispered to me.

"If you look at the situation this way, it is not the worst option. But we will give the energy cell on a safe territory. One of your boys takes off all his weapons and armor, sits on the speeder with us, and then I give him the energy cell. That's the only way to do it. If you're thinking of attacking and taking it by force, you brought a specialist with you, right? I've mined the energy cell, I don't care if I die from your weapons or from the explosion. I've tied the detonator to brain activity, only I will die and there will be a big badaboom.

"We did not underestimate you, we did not underestimate you," the man replied and nodded to his subordinate to come over to us.

It turned out to be the same specialist, and after looking at the energy cell, he immediately came out and confirmed the bomb threat. In fact, it was not exactly a bomb, but it had a similar effect.

"We agree, Farko will fly with you," the man pushed the specialist toward the speeders.

Both Liya and I realized that they were not going to let us go, but we had to do something. After leaving the shelter in the form of an old boat, we approached the speeder. Leah immediately hooked a block on the speeder's onboard computer, She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, and then nodded to me.

Leah got behind the wheel, and I wasn't sure I could drive, but I was sure of Leah. I sat behind her, just like last time, and in front of me sat Farko, who was trembling with fear. I patted him a little mockingly on the shoulder and then the speeder started to pick up speed.

Almost immediately, at some distance from us, other speeders took to the air. But we weren't going to fly far. We shouldn't forget that Leah grew up here and knew the area like the back of her hand. As soon as we started to fly near the valve of the bunker through which organic waste used to come, she pulled me out of the speeder, and the speeder, along with the energy cell and the Farko, continued to fly on. A few seconds later, we fell on the valve itself and rolled down it into the middle of the processing mechanism. Leah immediately jumped up and pulled the only lever she knew, and it was just in time, as we heard other fighters landing on the valve, but it was too late, a second later we were already separated by the armored gate leaves.

"We have at least an hour, in an hour the doors will automatically open, let's run," she answered and jumped right into the middle of the long-dormant conveyor, and a second later I jumped after her. Now was not the time to think about what had happened, I had to get to a safe place, and only then could I think about what had happened to me today.